Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

This game reminds me in a weird way of an older parser game called Byzantine Perspective. Both revolve around a strange issue with perspective that takes a while to resolve.

My first thought when playing this game was bewilderment. All of the game text was about a kind of mystical garden, frightening and old. You stumble around in it, looking for escape.

But, the choices are all about a conversation that you have on a train with a stranger who looks oddly familiar.

The game ended really quickly at first, but I realized it was called a maze. I eventually figured a way out: (Spoiler - click to show)picking choices related to connecting to the stranger next to you. Near the end, I picked wrong, but replayed and got it right.

The ending resolves the discrepancy in perspective.

Edit: This review has been changed after getting some new perspective from others.

I have liked the other games by this author, and so I feel bad giving two stars (and I would raise it if asked). However, I will try to explain why I'm doing so.

This is a two-screen game with no choices. It does have fade-in text on each of those screens. It's for Neo Twiny Jam, so has less than 500 words.

It does have a nice background image and some ambient music, so I do feel it is polished. Without interactivity, all that remains for a game to be good or bad (for my tastes) is its emotional impact and its descriptiveness.

But it's hard to know what's going on. Is there a war? Is there a posse coming? What's our relationship to the woman in question? Is the ending metaphorical or literal?

Obviously a story can be ambiguous and still be fantastic, so I don't think all these things have to be spelled out. But I felt more confused than intrigued. The overall theme is one I had difficulty picking out; the ending suggests a theme of (Spoiler - click to show)alienation or lost nostalgia, but it's hard to see how the beginning fits in that case.

I guess this review is more of a plea for understanding. If someone can give me a helpful lens by which to view the game, I'll increase its rating.

I've been playing all past Spring Thing games. Many of them are long parser games, longer than would be entered into IFComp, and this one is no exception.

It's a Lovecraftian game where you run a bookstore and need to stop someone from collecting an evil music libretto that would end the world.

The map is really large. Much of the game consists in walking across town, like from your house to your friend's house and back. It gives the city a bit more of a real feel. There are a lot of NPCs, too.

In the game you can read a book to learn spells, and randomized combat features in a couple of segments.

The storyline adheres closely to Lovecraftian ideas, incorporating things like ancient evil gods, cults, and mysteries from Africa, adhering to Lovecraft's idea of foreigners being creepy.

The game is quite long, with the walkthrough split into 9 chapters.

If there's one big deficiency, it's in providing more synonyms and descriptions. With a game this big it makes sense that things would fall through the cracks, and they do. In the last area I found people with descriptions like 'you don't see anything interesting about _____' and various items were the same. Some verbs don't have synonyms, so for a bottle of liquid SQUEEZE BOTTLE ONTO _____ works but PUT BOTTLE ON ______ doesn't.

This short Twine game managed to surprise me quite a bit (although me saying it is surprising will likely make it less surprising to others). It just didn't go where I thought it would and sat and made me think for a while.

You are working in your office when your clock stops. All of your clocks stop, in fact, even digital ones. You try to figure out what's going on, but things seem slow for everyone.

This game is less than 500 words long, and is part of Twiny Jam. It only has one choice, I think, with the rest being linear. Overall, it was refreshing to play.

This game uses a few cards from a tarot deck that you can flip over and click on in order to reveal story text. It uses less than 500 words as part of the Twiny Jam.

The writing is descriptive and well-done. It's not easy to parse, though, and I'm still not sure exactly what it's about. It seems to be written from the perspective of a shapeshifting pond monster, but I'm not sure.

Visually very lovely and the writing is good. Very short.

This is a brief choice-based game where you're vibing inside your spaceship.

It has atmospheric background music and custom font and some illustration.

In it, you make a variety of low-stakes decisions about how to spend your time. Snack, or eat a meal? Look out the window of your spaceship at the stars, or watch a movie?

There are two possible endings, and the very end was the strongest part in my opinion.

The writing is fairly non-specific in a way that it can apply in a lot of situations. This makes it more of a self-reflective exercise in some ways than a story to be told, so if you're looking for a game to help you relax and mirror yourself this is a good option.

This is part of a long series of Adrift games which generally consist of big maps, lots of NPCs, magical abilities, knights, wizards, etc. with traditional adventure puzzles. There have been some exceptions in the series (like a timed game and a small casual game) but this game is in the main vein of the series.

In it, you are on a quest to a magical labyrinth. To get there, you must first explore a forest, a strange and unusual world with things like (big spoilers) (Spoiler - click to show)cars and asphalt, and finally the labyrinth itself.

There are usually 4-6 puzzles available at each moment, with not a lot of red herrings, so it's not too hard to solve most puzzles by experimentation, especially as there are a lot of hints given. On the other hand, each area has a puzzle or two which would be pretty hard to figure out without help. Sometimes implementation is lacking, like a (Spoiler - click to show)puzzle piece where (Spoiler - click to show)PUT PIECE ON PUZZLE or PUT PIECE IN PUZZLE don't work but (Spoiler - click to show)FINISH PUZZLE does.

Since each area has a puzzle that's hard due to either being a tricky puzzle or rough implementation, this game can take a long time to finish. I used a walkthrough for most of it. If you do do so, I'd recommend stopping once you get some spells and enter the labyrinth, as there's a fun segment that isn't as hard as the earlier parts and which would have been more fun without the walkthrough.

This is the second game by this author that I've played that was entered in the Neo Twiny Jam. Both are parser games.

The other game had a really creepy atmosphere that worked well with an unfinished/minimalist vibe. This game is less so.

In this game, there is an eight-headed giant you have to confront. Each head will request something different from you.

To prepare, you need to talk to everyone in your office to grab something from them. Then you can use those to defeat the giant.

There are some noticeable typos and despite the COMMAND command listing vocab, it's not often clear what to do or how the solution to a problem is supposed to be devised.

This is a pretty short twine game with about 2-3 screens.

It uses a lot of imagery in a way that it was hard to know what's going on. There is a great battle, and a promise to come back from a fight. There's a woman you love, and there's the moon, and they might be the same?

It's very hard to tell. It's clear the author felt some strong emotion while writing this, and while I can't discern their intended message or atmosphere, I can be grateful for the author communicating their feeling to me.

Like other 30x30 games this has really small text with a settings option to make the text larger.

This game was hard for me to understand. I played through it three times. I'm going to summarize it here as best I can.

It seems to me to be a science-fiction story where you live on a moon with your girlfriend, Eris. It also seems that (Spoiler - click to show)Eris was part of a Wandering Fleet where she murdered many people as a soldier. At some point she fell from the sky and was left brutally wounded. She is now older with grey hair. At some point (possibly when she landed) her heart was exposed and her aorta severed, and you were left coated in her blood. You watched the wound heal to a small scar. Eris is wiry and has trouble with cold and gravity. At some point you were also violent and followed her like a lap dog and killed people and supported her killing people (this is the part that didn't make sense so is likely wrong). Now you crave more close physical affection but you both hate and love her and she's kind of standoffish so everything kind of sucks but you kind of like it.

It's relatively brief, with complex writing and choices that lead to substantially different material on different playthroughs.